Strepito e garbuglio is a long piece for double bass in which the exploration of the rich sound material offered by the instrument (of which the word “strepito”, “rough noise”, expresses the quality in its raw state) accompanies its progressive distillation brought about by the style of writing (characterized by the word “garbuglio”, a “tangle”). A tangle that is unwound: from a seismogram of material in constant development (unstable because it is rooted in low frequencies disturbed by different modes of attack and enwrapped by rhythmic figures that highlight the internal components of the sound, which are high, up to the most distant harmonics achievable with the instrumental techniques, and troubled by inertial phenomena of vibration that create still other voices inside the sonic mass) to a musical writing that transforms the complex sound object into a contrapuntal structure of voices that spread out autonomously. Noise that becomes sound. The double bass is seen as a large still which helps it carry out a process of distillation: various stages are presented, along a path that allows the “strepito” to become organized sound and even a melody, and forces the “garbuglio” to become a writing that unravels this mass, gives rise to single components, reconstituting the internal order and setting them in a formal balance. The general trend is a constant descent, despite the fact that the accumulation of explorative gestures of the material tends to make it rise and push it upwards, as in the process of distillation that brings about an ascending type of transformation of the material, until it reaches a gaseous state, but which can only conclude with a movement of the opposite kind, that is descending, until the essential liquid of the drops start to fall. The last section of the piece well represents this assembly of phases: a movement of notes that are repeated but progressively fall in quarter tones and/or semitones, ranging from pizzicatos to unison, that gradually break away from the note they belong to, “floating” like a third voice above this relentless descent, punctuated rhythmically by the 5th, 6th and 7th harmonics that suddenly bounce the pitches released by the force of attraction from the lowest register towards the highest, in which they emerge as the melody of a second voice like a filigree.